1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic conferencing. More specifically, the present invention relates to the scheduling of a multi-point electronic conference.
2. Background Information
Electronic conferencing systems and conferencing control services capable of supporting multi-point electronic conferences are known in the art. An example of such a personal video/data conferencing system is the ProShare(trademark) Video/Data Conferencing System developed and manufactured by Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., assignee of the present invention. An example of such conferencing control services is World Worx ServiceSM provided by ATandT of New Jersey.
However, most of today""s multi-point electronic conferencing systems/services have at least one disadvantage, in that in scheduling a multi-point electronic conference, a user has to typically schedule the conference manually, i.e. by calling the multi-point conferencing control service. While Intel""s Proshare(trademark) Video/data Conferencing System and ATandT""s World Worx ServiceSM provide computer aided scheduling, and allow a user to submit conference schedules electronically, the combination still has the disadvantage of allowing only the user to specify the scheduled participants by either entering their names and connection addresses or selecting them from address books accessible to the user. Since address books accessible to a user are typically limited to the user""s own private address books or address books available on a networked server, such as a corporate address book, thus effectively, the domain from which the user can select the scheduled participants is limited to those having had prior contacts with the user (and the user have taken the effort to record their names and connection addresses) or those having certain affinities, such as organizational, with the user.
Since it is often necessary and desirable to be able to schedule a multi-point electronic conference with participants that do not have prior recorded contacts or affinities with a user, it is desirable to be able to have an approach to schedule multi-point electronic conferences that offer a larger domain from which the user can select the scheduled participants. As will be disclosed in more detail below, the method and apparatus of the present invention achieves these and other desirable results.
A computer system is programmed with a scheduler for scheduling multi-point electronic conferences with a multi-point conferencing control service. The scheduler is equipped to automatically connect a user to an independent directory service for selection of some or all of the participants the user wants to be included in the multi-point electronic conference being scheduled. In the presently one embodiments, the user is connected to an independent directory service of the user""s choice, and the independent directory services available for selection are public directory services having names and connection addresses for a large number of persons.
In one embodiment, the scheduler is a component of a general purpose electronic conference (GPEC) system being programmed onto the computer system. In an alternate embodiment, the scheduler is a component of a multi-point conferencing control service being programmed onto the computer system.